> California's housing crisis has repercussions all up and down the west coast.
You're looking at it the wrong way. It's not that the situation in California has wider repercussions, it's that there is a wider problem whose symptoms happen to manifest themselves earliest in California because it's one of the nicer places to live: there are simply too many people and not enough space for them all to live in the nice places.
And as someone who lived in Europe for a while, I think we've had the technology to house a fair number of people in desirable area for several hundred years. It's the political will that's lacking.
Japan also has somewhat adverse housing regulations that waste a lot of construction. They are likely kept in place to stimulate economic activity - but it's not a particularly friendly environment for home ownership or environmental concerns.
Americans think government is evil and all that. So there's no government rescue plan to build more housing because that's commie talk. So everyone's waiting for the market to fix it.
There has to be an incentive for real estate developers.
There's a project at my former company that will redevelop a part of downtown SF. There was a massive back and forth and iterations that had to be done because the numbers guy at the real estate development company wanted to cut out all residential since commercial would be more profitable.
Those are the people you have to incentivize to make it work.
What SF probably needs is not huge projects downtown, but more incremental growth further out. In Europe, in a city that size, you'd see a lot more 4/5/6 story development, rather than the huge skyscrapers downtown and then 1/2/3 story in a lot of residential areas.
I agree. Same in LA. I was merely pointing out things I heard directly from people working with a major real estate developer there. I know from the design side that there was a major fight to try and get in some sort of affordable residential vs what the developer was hearing from their number crunchers.
Yeah, stuff in SF is complex. Could be that, yeah, if they decided to add some residential, they got more NIMBY pushback, or some kind of requirement to add N% 'affordable' that made it pencil out as less profitable.
It's possible but honestly I don't think that's a factor only that commercial real estate in downtown SF is going to get them more bang for their buck right now. Their timeline is looking 5-10 years out so they have their shit together (as well as experience) to deal with SF stuff.
You really think the problem of refusing to build more housing in San Francisco would be solved if only you could get rid of the right-wingers who have run the place for years? Oh if only leftists had a chance to run the government for a change, they'd build plenty of housing, but the right-wingers who have made all their policies for years call that "commie talk"....
> Tokyo added more housing than the entire state of California:
And anyone who wants to live in a 250 square foot apartment and get stuffed (literally!) into a subway every day to get to work is free to move there. But the people who find SV desirable move there in no small measure because it's not like Tokyo.
Just heard a lady in my neighborhood in L.A. complaining about the development of a parking lot and crackhouse into a modern apartment building. Didn’t even bother to argue, sometimes the divide is too great.
And what exactly is wrong with NIMBY-ism? Not everyone likes living in dense cities. I don't see anything wrong with groups of people who prefer to live in less dense development working together to create less dense places to live.
The problem is that there are (as I said) more people who prefer to live in less dense development than there is space to accommodate them all. At that point, the market takes over and decides who gets to have a back yard and who has to settle for the fifth floor walkup. Given the problem statement, isn't that the best possible outcome?
As long as enough high-rise apartments actually get built somewhere, this is fine. The problem is, the NIMBYs are broadly distributed, and tend to fight such construction everywhere.
NIMBYism is fine, as long as it is applied to businesses as well as housing. Way too many towns and cities want to maintain their low density small town & suburban characters while attracting employers.
That's kind of funny. East Hollywood is already pretty dense (not height-wise though) compared to surrounding areas. I can see from a parking standing point what the complaint would be but...I don't know, any new building in E Hollywood is an improvement.
Then again, my assumption is this some old lady that has been in the neighborhood for a while. Her kids won't give a shit about the growth when they can live in or sell her house for a shit ton of money.
That's ridiculous. Soviet-style central planning is not what is happening in the Bay area. The zoning there is being done by democratically elected governments and the land being developed is privately owned and can be freely bought and sold. The resulting high prices are absolutely the result of market forces.
Why are democratically elected governments and Soviet-style planning mutually exclusive? Democratically elected governments do all sorts of horrible and unjust things. For modern examples see Erdogan and Duterte.
The land itself is privately owned, sure, but undeveloped land is not very useful.
Nobody has recommended this straw man of a proposal. This is an example of an argument made in bad faith.
The topic is development of single-story housing into apartments. The Bay Area is rife with short houses around transit terminals.
You would have less traffic in the Valley if there were more apartments, so employees could bike and walk to work. They now commute from neighboring cities.
> You would have less traffic in the Valley if there were more apartments, so employees could bike and walk to work.
This assumes that all of the houses vacated by currently commuting employees moving into apartments near transit (and thus becoming non-commuters) would be replaced by people who don't commute. But that's extremely unlikely to be the case.
Furthermore, all of the people living near transit would still drive on occasion, so traffic would almost certainly get worse.
You are free to buy the redwood forests, pay a yearly land value tax on them (which goes up as demand increases, unlike Prop 13) and then restrict access as you wish.
But redwood forests are a distraction. The main problem is SFH which can and would be replaced with duplexes and fourplexes if the market were allowed to work.
Much of the forest land on the peninsula is privately owned, not by individuals, but by conservation organizations.
> The main problem is SFH
Except that people like their yards and pools.
All else being equal, denser housing is better. But all else is rarely equal. Almost invariably, increased density comes with increased population. The SFH it replaces doesn't get turned back into open space, it remains SFH. Or it turns into more MFH, so now you have N times as many people living in the same space. That is the problem.
I don't have a moral objection to SFH. If people like they can keep paying for their SFH via increased property taxes. But Prop 13 breaks that feedback loop.
Immigration is not a problem. It is an opportunity.
N people live in a place. K people want to move there. You can either find ways to accommodate N+K people, or you can choose not to and have the richest people drive out the poorest (or the middle class if you start building affordable housing). Only one of those two options is classist and xenophobic. Take your pick.
NIMBY is such a tired criticism. I live in an exurban/rural town on the East Coast. My town pretty consistently votes against major developments. We like the apple orchards and forest land like it is. We don’t want suburban style developments that increase traffic and taxes or industrial development outside of the light industry on the north side of town near the highway. If you want to call it NIMBY go ahead. As far as I’m concerned it’s just voting for how the local community should be.
I feel like if you want to control what gets built on a certain parcel of land, you should own it. If you want to keep those apple orchards around, make a better offer when a developer tries to buy them out.
As a practical matter that means no one except the very richest could live anywhere and have any control over arbitrary construction happening next door or their neighborhood as a whole. There’s plenty of precedent throughout history of groups taking collective actions based on the will of the majority.
If you want to keep wild lands, the best way to do so is to increase density where people already live.
And the best way to do that is probably via a market-based, incremental approach: not everyone is going to sell out and turn their SFH into flats right away - it'd be gradual.
If you drive 30 minutes any direction from San Francisco, you will see plenty of vast empty fields covered with wild grasses.
I don't argue that we should cover all the land available with houses, I like wild grass, but I just point out that if we really hadn't enough space -- we would have settled it already.
I've never heard the now popular "Earth is overpopulated" rant from anyone who lives outside major metro. Going by train in Russia or Japan (yes, Japan) and watching empty fertile lands for hours is a really useful educational experience.
Also,
1. Americans love to live in private houses. And that takes up way more space, and energy to maintain than condos/flats. Yes, some people in other countries just cannot afford private house, but I've noticed often they just feel anything bad about living in a condo.
2. Americans like their cars. And parking/highways take a lot of space, obviously.
Yes, I fly into Santa Clara every week and live in the Portland, OR area (actually across the river in Vancouver). When I fly in it seems far from dense ... there is room for a lot more housing w/o becoming super dense.
I think people in the Bay Area got their's and don't want others moving in... they love the high prices... it suits them just fine.
And that is the problem. You're not the only one. Yes, if we turned the San Francisco Bay area into a clone of Manhattan or Hong Kong or Tokyo we could accommodate a lot more people. But a lot of people would not consider that a good outcome. People who like that kind of lifestyle can have it in any of the dozens of dense cities on the planet.
The SFBay area is desirable precisely because it is not (yet) dense. People move here because they like yards and redwood trees and vineyards and hiking trails. Manifestly there are more people who want these things than there is space to accommodate all of them. That is the problem.
> People move here because they like yards and redwood trees and vineyards and hiking trail
no, they want jobs. you can get outdoors anywhere in the US, but only a few places in the US actually have a super vibrant economy.
and NOTHING precludes turning SF into a stack of 120-story high-density towers apartments for all family types and leaving the redwoods and grassy fields alone.
nothing but the unwillingness to go density, thus ensuring the grassy fields will slowly be turned into cookie cutter suburbs
Going to be fun getting around those 120 story towers given the rest of San Francisco’s infrastructure including mass transit. There’s always the cable car I guess. But it shouldn’t take more than a few decades to expand that further as well.
This is a red herring argument. There is no need to raze the redwoods or pave Golden Gate Park.
Changing the single-family zoning to just allow 2 or 3 story housing on 1 out of 10 blocks would be enough to alleviate the shortage, provided developers had few enough regulatory obstacles.
It boggles my mind that the Palo Alto Caltrain abuts single family homes with 5000 sq ft yards. Their quality of life is low due to the noise and traffic. That area really should be apartments.
Going to Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, or any other similar city will show you that a little density in the right places can accommodate many people.
Paris isn’t a sci-fi dystopia. It’s still pleasant, and has more than 2x density as SF.
>The SFBay area is desirable precisely because it is not (yet) dense.
False. San Francisco has an entire quadrant of non-walkable non-mixed use areas that need to be rezoned and connected to its light rail transit network (Richmond). Density does not preclude green spaces. All residents have a park within a 10 minute walk[0].
> But a lot of people would not consider that a good outcome.
If they didn't consider that a good outcome, they would stop paying money to move there, or move out, and cause housing prices to drop, thus solving the problem.
personal incentives don't "solve" social problems. People compete themselves into subsistence -- not motivated to improve a situation until it's too miserable to bear, and then back off just to the edge. This is the "tragedy of the commons" coordinate problem
Except what the SF Bay Area is facing isn't the Tragedy of the Commons--it's the Tragedy of the Anticommons, where the owners of resources underutilize them.
Vineyards and redwood trees are not found in suburban neighborhoods, and an apartment building next door does not threaten your yard. Nobody want to expand into nature areas, we want to build taller and denser where there are already buildings and transit stations.
> Vineyards and redwood trees are not found in suburban neighborhoods
They are around here. I have three redwood trees in my own yard, and I'm a half hour bike ride from multiple redwood groves. There are even a couple of vineyards around here.
> an apartment building next door does not threaten your yard
Parking lots for the nearby hiking trails are already overflowing on weekends and holidays. Squeezing in more people has a very direct negative impact on quality of life.
Concerns about global overpopulation are not usually about housing, but how much of the total energy in the system can be safely diverted to our uses. I think it is reasonable to be concerned when one species controls a large fraction of the energy in an ecosystem.
On average, moving one person from a small town in the midwest to SF reduces resource consumption, so from that point of view construction in SF should be encouraged. Tearing down abandoned houses in small midwestern towns and converting them to wildland should also be encouraged.
A big reason for that is those communities are ultra nimby. If you want to buy land, it needs to be a large plot. This makes it inaccessible cost wise to most people even if they want to be pioneering.
This is what people tell themselves in order to make their suffering tolerable. But the best places to live even just in California are amazingly underpopulated.
The best places to live are the best in no small measure because they are underpopulated. The SF peninsula is one of the most desirable (and expensive) areas in the greater bay area in no small measure because very few people live there, so we have less traffic, hiking trails, horse properties, peace and quiet.
> The best places to live are the best in no small measure because they are underpopulated.
I don't really get that. Where I lived in Italy had about 300,000 people in roughly the same size area as Bend (less than 100K), and I thought it was a pretty nice place in a lot of ways. We didn't have a yard for the kids, so we went down to the local park with them, where they saw their friends and we'd get to chat with parents. Because most people live in towns, they're able to protect some natural areas close to the town that I could ride my bike to.
I get that some people really want the 'country' experience, but then you shouldn't live in the middle of millions of people (the bay area). There are shit-tons of small towns with lots of cheap-ish land outside them that are nice in their own way.
By letting cities be cities, we get to protect more land, which I think many of us support.
I don’t disagree with you. I wonder at which point is it unethical to build more office space if the Bay Area has determined it prefers peace and quiet. Jobs can then relocate to places that want growth.
If you want to advocate for a state law that requires all new commercial development be accompanied by corresponding residential development close enough that workers can commute by transit or bicycle, I would totally support that. I think it would be a hard sell, but might be doable.
Looking at Redfin, I see similarly-prices places in Presidio Heights, Marina, and near Dolores Park in Mission, all with much smaller lot sizes.
Sure, Peninsula is expensive, but its proximity to jobs is the major driver of its housing costs.
You can have all that and more in Salinas or San Luis Obispo, but you’ll find that the lack of jobs makes property values far lower.
You don’t have to tear down parkland or pave the horse trails to allow a few more large apartment complexes next to the already noise-polluting Caltrain line.
That could not be further from the truth. There are lots of cheap places to live in the US that are still very nice, you just don't want to live there.
Those places have trade-offs, just like anywhere else. For example, the Midwest is a very nice place to live, but the winters here are absolutely awful and we also tend to have at least a month in the summer where it's also extremely hot. The job market for tech is decent, but it's not nearly as lucrative as the coastal markets, although the low cost of living does make up for that to a degree. These things matter a lot for some people, even if not so much for you.
As much as a lot of non-SV folks, myself included, enjoy ragging on California, the nice weather and good job prospects make it a very desirable place to live, and as such makes people far more tolerant of the hilariously awful housing situation and political climate.
I'm not sure what part of that contradicts what I said. The OP said there are too many people and no places to live. That's not the same as "the weather isn't as nice in the cheaper places, I'm painted in to a corner"
> If lots of people wanted to live in these supposed cheap...
It doesn't have to be "lots of people", just the executives that build and lease office buildings and set remote work policies.
Most people could be ambivalent-to-averse to living in the Bay Area but if the high paying and attractive (1) jobs are there, they'll end up moving there anyway.
(1) That is, jobs working for companies who consider technology a competitive advantage, not an expense.
> If lots of people wanted to live in these supposed cheap, nice places they'd all be moving there instead of norcal.
There are over 300 million people in the US. What is this generalization supposed to mean? Try to look past extrapolating the 20 mile radius you live in to the entire country.
There are nice, cheap places all over NorCal, but the expensive part is where the jobs are. Fort Bragg and Redding are absolutely gorgeous but they do not have a dense tech job market.
Fort Bragg and Redding are cold and foggy much of the time. Silicon Valley is in an ideal location. There are low-lying hills that keep the fog away, but it still gets enough ocean influence that it doesn't get too hot.
> Fort Bragg and Redding are cold and foggy much of the time
Fort Bragg is on the coast, and Redding is inland - they have wildly different climates. Redding is pretty damn hot, actually, and supposedly very sunny:
The politics are probably not something most SF people would like, though (nor I, really).
There are a ton of beautiful places around there, though, and in southern Oregon as well. The oak/madrone/pine forests in that area are extremely beautiful in my opinion.
Sorry, I somehow got Redding confused with Eureka.
Yes, Redding is uncomfortably hot.
In fact, that's generally true: everything inland is hot, and everything on the coast is cold. In between there's a narrow strip that is "just right". SV just happens to be in this sweet spot.
We've created our own problems with low density zoning which makes it difficult to scale out housing in geographically constrained areas with strong economic growth like the Bay Area and Seattle.
There have been many threads recently which blame Amazon and other tech companies for creating Seattle's problems, yet other communities all over the US and beyond are clamoring for the exact same problem.
Seattle has gone a long way to accommodate the growth, but it still isn't enough. Too much of the city is zoned for single family residences. And the Bay Area suffers from the same issues.
Exactly, money can move places faster than housing markets can respond. Some areas are unwilling to increase density, and some areas will be willing. I suspect that there is a practical physical and economic limit to the increase of density that many cities will be willing or able to scale to - and some may scale to destroy that quality that made them desirable places to live in the first place. There is a reason that not all cities make it to New York City level density.
You're looking at it the wrong way. It's not that the situation in California has wider repercussions, it's that there is a wider problem whose symptoms happen to manifest themselves earliest in California because it's one of the nicer places to live: there are simply too many people and not enough space for them all to live in the nice places.